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Alternate Light Gem


BrendaEM

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Sadly, someone accidently posted the sign in front of the internet ... "WC - toilet". Meanwhile, visualizing real people exist on the internet can be the first step to seeing reality in a virtual matrix. And then realizing, real people have no infinite amount of time to implement every single idea possible.

 

Is damage so crucial? Thief is not a damage intensive game to require fancy statistics. Imho, most of the damage I saw was from accidents or mistakes, and most could be quite embarassing enough as punishment to know any damage occurred at all -- and add something so disgraceful as taking a potion to heal from it. Unlike other games, having no damage and maintaining all the items at the end that I started with is kind of a reward encouraged by this game slightly.

 

I like the idea of transparency mentioned earlier to help with a minimal hud. Having the health bar hardly visible at all is enough for me to know if I am hurt.

 

I also like the idea of transparency of the hud mentioned that surrounds the gem and other items varying according to how visible you.

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No, I won't get used to it, I'm freelance, so I pick and choose what I want to do. You choose to work in some generic factory which regurgitates trash titles for the plebes, so you have to accept part of the blame for the product.

You can only pick and choose when people are clamoring for you. And to get there you have to build a name for yourself. And a good way to do that is to get your name into things. Such as sticking with the DarkMod, or not turning down contracts unless you really can't spare the time. Even if you don't want to do these things.

 

And I'm getting experience at my job that will be quite valuable when I choose to work on my own. You can't make the same claim - you don't know what you're missing. And no I won't accept part of the blame - I already have been doing everything I can to make a difference. But it's also my job, and I like doing this for a job - beats working at an internet cafe.

 

But even if I did choose to accept part of the blame, on some stupid semantical technicality that you created, I still invalidate your statement;

Game developers all all lazy cunts to the last man, that's why they keep pumping out the same repetitive titles in the same few genres. The thought of doing anything new or adding any extra work gives them nightmares,
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The whole fault lies with the Spinning Jenny and James Hargreaves. Because of that people lost their freedom and opportunity to work from home in the british textile cottage industry. This started the move of people to factories and made almost every person an employee.
The empire was good. I think that Justus Liebig is the key reason it collapsed.

Holy fuck, man. Stop talking like an Encyclopedia Britannica version of ELIZA.

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Is damage so crucial? Thief is not a damage intensive game to require fancy statistics. Imho, most of the damage I saw was from accidents or mistakes, and most could be quite embarassing enough as punishment to know any damage occurred at all -- and add something so disgraceful as taking a potion to heal from it. Unlike other games, having no damage and maintaining all the items at the end that I started with is kind of a reward encouraged by this game slightly.

 

I think damage should be crucial because the FM should be so goddam hard that you cannot finish it without damage. If Items are in the game, they should be there because you practically have to use them to finish, if you dont have to pat yorself on the back but why place items or have them at all if the situation never really demands using them?

 

In the Precursor games, one of the things that started telling me the games were getting old was that I was finishing them will buckets of tools/resources. WHen I place a healing potion in a game, believe me, the player is going to fall on his/her knees when they find it because it will seem like a gift from God and not a moment too soon.

 

I like jumps, drops, etc that take a few health away from you. Its more realistic IMHO, makes it seem like you are getting your hands dirty, taking real risks.

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I like jumps, drops, etc that take a few health away from you. Its more realistic IMHO, makes it seem like you are getting your hands dirty, taking real risks.

Mandatory damage is, in fact, an indescribably stupid thing to put in an FM. It makes it entirely too easy for the player to put the mission in an unwinnable state.

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I completely agree with ZylonBane on the issue of unavoidable damage. The thing is, you really can't predict what's going to happen to the player - how badly they were hurt, how they re-arranged movable objects, etc. Furthermore, unavoidable damage assumes that the player either has a source of infinite healing (which might make the map too easy, depending on the style), or will only be traversing the jump once (which usually requires linearity). Suggesting that you could design a map well enough that that the player manages to find health potions just when they need them sounds like a lot of hubris to me. (unless you're comfortable with scripting, and want to attempt an auto-balancing map, perhaps)

 

If you want the player to feel like they're taking real risks, I'd suggest another strategy. Perhaps have the primary goals always possible to complete, but also have optional goals that are drastically more risky and dangerous. If the player just wants to beat the level (or got the crap kicked out of them, and is in no condition to continue mucking about), they can complete the minimum objectives, but if they're feeling particularly brave (and healthy), they can take a huge risk and try to sneak through the (heavily patrolled) barracks to steal the captain's jeweled sword. That is a real risk and the result of a real choice the player makes.

 

There's only one case where I might consider unavoidable damage ok: cutscenes. Of course, it shouldn't be possible for the cutscene to kill the player - you'd only want to lower their health if it's above a certain amount.

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Ok that makes sense, the side missions/core missions idea especially. I just felt damage like that sometimes added a bit of realism but I guess you would have to set it up to repair the health almost immediately, which would look contrived. But I still want to make hard FM side missions then, some real ballcrushers like umm, that insane asylum FM for T2, with NHs tweaks applied. It was freakishly hard, took me like two nights of inching around from shadow to shadow, it was great. Not that every FM needs to be that way I guess.

 

Zylon, go to your room!

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...I guess you would have to set it up to repair the health almost immediately, which would look contrived.

Like in Doom where you get a rocket launcher and a butt load of ammo, and you're thinking "Okay, here we go" and a crap load of enemies come at you. Fine for a game that doesn't try to be more than a "game", but not good when you're trying to immerse yourself in a believable world.

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Well, that point can cut both ways.

In the real world, sometimes random crap really does happen unexpectedly, the stairs giving way from under you, stuff falling apart, ledges that aren't precisely placed for your jumps -- I think that's what Max was going for. You don't want to have a world look contrived to keep the player in a protective bubble either. And random damage, if done "realistically", pops that bubble.

 

I think it could only be fairly pulled off if you did it right near the beginning of a mission, when health is guaranteed to be near full, and then play-test to see how the mission plays with the lesser health amount to avoid the contrived look of boosting health to compensate. Then it could actually be a way the author can tweak the player's strategic thinking by tweaking the cost-benefit thinking that goes on. But this wouldn't really work if it happened later in the game.

 

I don't think I'd do it unless I felt it was really advancing the tension of a place or story or immersion ... But even then you could have some event doing the job (e.g., stairs collapsing to give the old heart a skipped beat) without actually doing damage in the end (what a relief!).

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Like say, collapsing stairs plunging the player down a 100-foot shaft into an inch-deep puddle of water, completely cushioning his fall.

 

I was thinking more like a 4 foot fall to the ground level. I don't know many stairwells above 100-foot shafts. ^_^

 

I think the more general lesson is that architecture that looks too much like it was designed with the player's visceral experience in mind can tend to be a little gimmicky, whether in punishing him OR protecting him (or in ZB's farce-example, both at the same time). But I honestly think you can still get some excitement just being creative with run-of-the-mill architecture you could find in any actual building. It's better if you be creative with conventional stuff rather than pulling a gimmick out your stairwell.

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Speaking of water...

 

Will TDM be implementing the standard play mechanic of a fall from any height being harmless as long as you touch water first?

 

I'd really almost rather it didn't. I'd like to see something more like, hitting water does a quarter the damage of hitting ground, and if you hit the ground underwater you take full damage from that too.

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Sadly I was unable to find a hosted version of Mr. Bunwah's Guide to Achieving a Perfect Single-player score, which was an excellent piece of writing about game design. He even had an article about the evil of ladders and advocated placing a pool of water at the bottom of each ladder lest the player lose their grip (under no circumstances should the mapper try to design a safer, less buggy ladder!). He even went into detail about the physics of why you don't break your ankles when landing in an inch of water: You see, the anti-ions in the player's socks and the water repel each other, resulting in non-linear forces and er, quantum stuff... I don't know how it works, but the moral of the story is that not taking damage when landing in an inch of water is entirely realistic. :P

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I'd like to see something more like, hitting water does a quarter the damage of hitting ground, and if you hit the ground underwater you take full damage from that too.

 

I don't think we've implemented the first part, or remember whether it's in our plans to do so, but the second part already works. Water slows you down, but if you hit the bottom you'll still take damage based on your momentum--so falling into a puddle won't help you at all. :)

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People need to stop making suggestions. Realize these things take a lot of time and effort! It's not magic, and you have to figure out whether the effort and time spent is worth it. This is -definitely- not.

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You can argue that making realistic graphics is not worth it, just keep the same old graphics from 8 years ago. You can make that argument for every part of the game and say that nothing needs to be improved from Thief 1, since everyone apparently thought that game was great.

In that case, just forget TDM completely and go back to making FMs for T1.

I'd prefer TDM to do some new shit, rather than reheat the old one.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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Good news. You can play T1 for another 8 years because adding a whole bunch of extra features will delay the project. Seems you have the patience to wait.

This is a mod. We can do something (successfully) that game developers can only dream about--and unfortunately, are starting to emulate with "episodic gaming": we release in increments. For example, we could easily set a final goal of making a Thief-style MMO, complete with realistically scaled continents, but we don't have to leave everyone hanging. We release a toolset now (really, more like '08), and continue to expand on it while building up the content, releasing areas in Great Britain-sized chunks. Even if the gameplay is totally different when we're done, it will still be recognizably TDM, and no one will have to wait to play it, having played fm's for years.

 

A Thief-MMO is a bit far-fetched, practically speaking, but it illustrates why we're releasing a toolset. Mappers can have the all the basics they need to create Thief-style missions, and nobody has to deal with waiting for us to try to create a campaign. Most other single-player mods are based around trying to tell a story, first and foremost, and a few hope that the community will pick it after they're done. We already have an large and eager community (we hope they're large and eager) who want to use our creation to tell their own stories and could care less about our story.

 

No one needs to stop making suggestions; they just have to realize that it's almost certainly not going to make it in the first release if we haven't already thought of it and agreed to do it. My own dream of improving on Penumbra's object manipulation system is probably going to have to be way-sided unless it can be done as an improvement to Ishtvan's already excellent manipulation system. oDDity's dream (and my own) of players having to set broken bones (and perhaps even do surgery) won't make into the first release. There will not be a campaign until after the first release. That doesn't mean we can't talk about what we'd like do--not at all. Don't treat our first release as the last. There's always room for improvement. B)

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